Why pujols cant hit

Unlike in reaction-time tests, the difference between top volleyball players and novices was enormous. For the elite players, a fraction-of-a-second glance was all they needed to determine whether the ball was present.

And the better the player, the more quickly she could extract pertinent information from each slide. In one instance Starkes tested members of the Canadian national women's volleyball team, which at the time included one of the best setters in the world. The setter was able to deduce whether the volleyball was present in a picture that was flashed before her eyes for 16 thousandths of a second.

Not only did the world-class setter detect the presence or absence of the ball in 16 milliseconds, but she also gleaned enough visual information to know when and where the picture was taken.

One woman's blink of light was another woman's fully formed narrative. It was a strong clue that one key difference between expert and novice athletes is not in the raw ability to react quickly but rather in the way the expert has learned to perceive the game.

At the time, coaching orthodoxy in field hockey held that innate reflexes were of primary importance. Conversely, the idea that learned perceptual skills were a hallmark of expert performance was, as Starkes puts it, "heretical.

In , when Starkes began helping the field hockey squad gear up for the '80 Olympics, she was dismayed to find that its coaches were relying on outdated ideas to choose and arrange the team. I was astounded that they had no idea that reaction time might not be predictive of anything. In fact, in her occlusion tests of field hockey players, Starkes discovered just what she had found in volleyball players, and more: Not only could elite field hockey players tell in less time than the blink of an eye whether or not a ball was in the frame, but they could also accurately reconstruct the playing field.

This held true among basketball and soccer players too. It was as if every elite athlete miraculously had a photographic memory when it came to her sport.

The question, then, is how important these perceptual abilities are to top athletes—and whether they are the result of genetic gifts. And there's no better place to look for an answer than in a type of competition in which the action is slow, deliberate and devoid of the constraints of muscle and sinew. In the early s, Dutch psychologist and chess master Adriaan de Groot began drilling for the core of chess expertise.

De Groot would test players of various skill levels and attempt to detect what made a grandmaster better than an average professional, and the average professional superior to a club player. The common wisdom at the time was that highly skilled chess players thought further ahead in the game than did less skilled players.

This is true when skilled players are compared with complete novices. But when De Groot asked both grandmasters and merely strong players to narrate their decision making in an unfamiliar game situation, he found that players of disparate skill levels mulled over the same number of pieces and proposed essentially the same array of possible moves.

Why then, De Groot wondered, do the grandmasters end up making better moves? De Groot assembled a panel of four players: a grandmaster and world champion, a master, a city champion and an average club player.

He enlisted another master to come up with different chess-piece arrangements taken from obscure games and then did something very similar to what Starkes would do with athletes 30 years later: He flashed the chessboards in front of the players for a matter of seconds and then asked them to reconstruct each scenario on a blank board.

The differences that emerged, particularly between the two masters and the two nonmasters, were "so large and unambiguous that they hardly need further support," De Groot wrote. In four of the trials, the grandmaster re-created the entire board after viewing it for three seconds.

The master was able to accomplish the same feat twice. Neither of the lesser players was able to reproduce any board with complete accuracy. In five seconds the grandmaster understood more of the game situation than the club player did in 15 minutes. In these tests, De Groot wrote, "it is evident that experience is the foundation of the superior achievements of the masters. Chase and Herbert A. Simon, the latter a future Nobel Prize winner—repeated the De Groot experiment and added a twist: They tested the players' recall for chessboards that contained random arrangements of pieces that could never occur in a game.

When the players were given five seconds to study the random assortments and then asked to re-create them, the recall advantages of the masters disappeared. Suddenly their memories were just like those of average players. In order to explain what they saw, Chase and Simon proposed a "chunking theory" of expertise, a pivotal idea that helps explain what Starkes found in her work with field hockey and volleyball players.

Chess masters and elite athletes alike "chunk" information on the board or the field. In other words, rather than grappling with a large number of individual pieces, experts unconsciously group information into a smaller number of meaningful chunks based on patterns they have seen before.

Whereas the average club player in De Groot's study was scanning and attempting to remember the arrangement of 20 individual chess pieces, the grandmaster needed to remember only a few chunks of several pieces each because the relationships between the pieces had great meaning for him. A grandmaster has a mental database of millions of arrangements of pieces that are broken down into at least , meaningful chunks, which are in turn grouped into mental "templates": large arrangements of pieces or players, in the case of athletes within which some pieces can be moved around without rendering the entire arrangement unrecognizable.

Where the novice is overwhelmed by new information and randomness, the master sees familiar order and structure that allows him to home in on information that is critical to making the decision at hand. Studies that track the eye movements of experienced performers, whether chess players, pianists, surgeons or athletes, have found that as they gain experience, they are quicker to sift through visual information and separate the wheat from the chaff.

Experts swiftly discard irrelevant input and cut to the data that are most important in determining their next move. While novices dwell on individual pieces or players, experts focus more attention on spaces between pieces or players that are relevant to the unifying relationship of parts in the whole. Most important in sports, perceiving order allows elite athletes to extract critical information from the arrangement of players or from subtle changes in an opponent's body movements in order to make unconscious predictions about what will happen next.

Bruce Abernethy was an undergraduate at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia, and an avid cricket player when he began to expand on Starkes's occlusion methods in the late s.

Abernethy started out using Super 8-mm film to shoot footage of cricket bowlers. He would show batsmen the film but cut it off before the throw and have them attempt to predict where the ball was headed. Unsurprisingly, expert players were better at predicting the path of the ball than novice players.

In the decades since, Abernethy, now associate dean for research at Queensland, has become exceedingly sophisticated at using occlusion tests to determine the basis of perceptual expertise in sports. Abernethy has moved his studies from the video screen to the field and the court.

He has equipped tennis players with goggles that go opaque just as an opponent is about to strike the ball, and he has outfitted cricket batsmen with contact lenses that produce varied levels of blurriness. The theme of Abernethy's findings is that elite athletes need less time and less visual information to predict what will happen in the future, and, without knowing it, they zero in on critical visual information. Elite athletes chunk information about bodies and players' positions the way grandmasters chunk arrangements of rooks and bishops.

Top tennis players, Abernethy found, could discern from the minuscule pre-serve shifts of an opponent's torso whether the ball was going to their forehand or backhand, whereas average players had to wait to see the motion of the racket, sacrificing invaluable response time. In badminton, if Abernethy hides the racket and entire forearm, it transforms elite players into near novices, an indication that in that sport, information from the lower arm is critical.

Pro boxers have a similar skill. A Muhammad Ali jab took a mere 40 milliseconds to arrive at the face of a victim standing a foot and a half away. Without anticipation based on body movements, Ali's opponents would have been beaten in Round 1, hit flush by every punch. Ali's skill at disguising the trajectory of a punch, and thus confounding opponents' anticipation, often meant his foes were finished in a few rounds anyway. To purchase a copy of The Sports Gene, go here.

England leads Poland by three points and has a healthy goal-differential advantage entering the final group game. The former Raiders coach is suing the NFL and people have thoughts about it. The New Orleans running back has been hampered by a knee injury this week. D'Ernest Johnson has a great opportunity to flex his skills with the Browns' depleted at running back. Louis, and it's. Teams have shifted on Pujols 38 percent of the time since , the second most among right-handed hitters with at least 1, plate appearances.

Against the shift, he is batting just. Many of the batted balls that were hits during the majority of his career -- for most of his life, really -- are now landing in opposing gloves, and Pujols has slowly progressed toward reluctant acceptance.

He doesn't like the idea of changing his swing path to adopt more launch angle. He also doesn't believe changing his approach "to hit a weak ground ball to second base" would solve anything. It's something everybody goes through. Pujols doesn't begrudge teams for maximizing a competitive advantage. Spray charts display hitter tendencies over large sample sizes and opposing defenses are foolish not to position themselves accordingly.

Pujols understands that. He would be in favor of Major League Baseball eliminating shifts altogether, adding that fans would "see a lot of offense back again like it was before.

The only change he adamantly vouches for is a reasonable one: Second basemen who are positioned up the middle should not be allowed to disrupt a hitter's line of vision and keep them from identifying a pitcher's release point. It's happening far too often.

Thinking about that makes Pujols think about all the line drives he has lost up the middle -- guaranteed hits in the baseball game he once knew. He is asked what his batting average would look like if second basemen played their position traditionally and didn't shade toward center field. Out of those 30 or 40 or 50 balls, give me 25 hits. Add those 25 hits to my. Those numbers seem a bit inflated.

Spray charts from Baseball Savant show Pujols making 16 outs on line drives toward the middle of the field this season. Of those 16, only five appear to have been clear singles under a traditional alignment. That is the amount of dollars owed to Pujols over the final three years of his contract, which lasts through and takes him all the way up to his age season. His mind is set on playing through it, and he doesn't need to re-evaluate anything this offseason. This is what happens.

We like the illusion that baseball players can be good until their late 30s or even early 40s. And every now and again, a player like that does come along — you can look at what Ortiz is doing now. They signed a year-old player already showing signs of decline, moved him into a tougher hitters ballpark in a new league. If you take emotion out of the equation and forget that his name is Albert Pujols, his decline into oft-injured designated hitter who hits a few home runs would have been as predictable as the Anaheim weather.

Just look at those numbers. He was a phenomenon. In St. He was the best hitter. He was a great fielder. He was not fast, but he made himself into a fantastic base runner. He was, more or less, the perfect ballplayer. The thing that made Pujols different was that he was not physically gifted like so many of the all-time greats.

He was no phenom. You know the story: He was drafted in the 13th round because scouts thought he had a bad body and thought that he had no natural defensive position. The Kansas City Royals famously passed on him again and again even though he went to high school 20 minutes from Kauffman Stadium. When Pujols was a rookie — and he had one of the all-time great rookie seasons hitting. This is actually a pretty low number for a modern-day slugger, but it sickened and embarrassed Pujols.

He determined that he would never strike out that many times again, and he never has. From to , Pujols ranked in the top 10 every year in fewest strikeouts per at-bat. When Pujols was 25, he decided that he needed to become a better base runner. It was something missing from his his game. When Pujols first came up, he played several different positions — first, third, a lot of outfield. He quickly became the best defensive first baseman in baseball.